The present invention relates to the sucrose phosphate synthase (SPS), its process for preparation, its cDNA, and utilization of cDNA to modify the expression of SPS in the plant cells.
Difficulties in the purification of sucrose phosphate synthase (SPS) from plants have interferred with efforts to characterize this enzyme. SPS catalyses the formation of sucrose phosphate, the sucrose precursor molecule, from fructose-6 phosphate and UDP-glucose in photosynthetically active plant cells. Sucrose phosphatase then acts on the sucrose phosphate moiety, in an irreversible reaction, to remove the phosphate and to release sucrose ready to translocate from the mature leaf (source) to any tissue requiring photoassimilate (sink), especially growing tissues including young leaves, seeds, and roots.
Because SPS is considered a rate limiting enzyme in the pathway providing sucrose to growing tissue, the study of SPS and its activity is of special interest. In a recent publication, Walker, J. L. and Huber, S. C., Plant Phys. (1989) 89 : 518-524, the purification and preliminary characterization of spinach (Spinachia oleracea) SPS was reported. However, monoclonal antibodies specific to the spinach SPS were found to be non-reactive with all other plants tested, xe2x80x9cclosely relatedxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9crelatively unrelated speciesxe2x80x9d, including corn (Zea maize), soybean (Glycine max), barley (Hordeum vulgare), and sugar beet (Beta vulgaris). Thus, additional purified sources of SPS enzyme are needed for effective characterization of this factor. Especially of interest is the characterization of the corn SPS because of its very high export rates, as compared for example, to SPS levels of activity as found in the leaves of soybean.
With the advent of biotechnology, the ability to modify various properties of plants, especially agronomically important crops, is of interest. In this regard, it would be useful to determine the coding sequence for an SPS gene to probe other crop sources, to use such coding sequences to prepare DNA expression constructs capable of directing the expression of the SPS gene in a plant cell and to express a DNA sequence encoding an SPS enzyme in a plant to measure the effects on crop yield due to the increased rate of sucrose translocation to growing tissues.